Turn your Apple TV into a PVR, fileserver, dvd player, wifi access point, youtube player, web server, print server, network storage device, streaming radio player, arcade emulator, digital signage processor, and more.
For those of you just joining us, there is a fairly involved process for hacking an apple tv that requires you to make a special boot drive on a usb disk. After booting this specially crafted software system your atv will be able to install 3rd party plugins.
Once you have SSH enabled, you will want to install the NitoTV plugin which will take care of installing several other components you'll want to make your Apple TV do more.
I have a feeling Apple is readying a big update and most of this stuff with stop working for a while... so get it installed and lock down your device to prevent the updates from wiping out all of your plugins. When it is safe to upgrade to the latest os you will hear about it on awkwardtv.
The big news this week is the release of xdog's plugin "A Series of Tubes" which is able to play youtube videos from the Apple TV interface. The plugin has now been released and can be easily installed using AlanQ's ATV Loader script.
If you want to watch Youtube movies on your Apple TV check out the Plugin over at AwkwardTV.
An extremely interesting post was put up on the XBMC forums earlier this week. Two developers from XBMC have set out to port XBMC to Linux!
Their plan is to port XBMC to Linux so it can be run on other hardware platforms. Some of the platforms mentioned include PS3, Apple TV, VIA Eden, and a Mac Mini.
This is really exciting news, and in only a short amount of time they've already got it working in Ubuntu Feisty.
It's too early to tell what's going to happen with this, but it's very exciting to know that development is being done to bring this amazing media player software to other hardware platforms. The idea would be that you have a bootable USB drive which included a live-cd-like experience to booting XBMC on the device. The livecd you download would need to be specific to the platform you wanted to run it on because of the different drivers and bootloaders that would be needed to make it all work.
Someone has posted a new plugin for the Apple TV that adds an Applications menu to the interface. From this menu you can launch other apps such as Centerstage, VLC or Joost. This brings us one step closer to seeing some really cool apps evolve on the Apple TV OS. Can't wait to see what people come up with.
Lots of people have talked about being able to do this, but so far I have not seen it done. We need to create a plugin that will launch another GUI app on top of the ATV menu. It should also take control of the IR remote to either pass remote commands on to the program or at least be able to listen to the menu keypress to exit the app and go back to the Apple GUI.
I have had limited success with getting apps to run fullscreen on top of the ATV interface. VLC, with all of it's fullscreen parameters does not show up above the ATV menu (it plays in the background, because I can hear sound).
There is one application that does run above the ATV menu when I launch it from SSH.
There is an app called Quartz Composer Player that will launch a .qtz file fullscreen in front of the ATV interface.
I took a peek at the source code. the only three lines that I think could be for putting the quartz composer player window above the atv finder are: int32_t shieldLevel = CGShieldingWindowLevel(); [window setLevel:shieldLevel]; [window makeKeyAndOrderFront:nil];
I think there can be a way to use this app and load other apps in a quartz window, or maybe the lines above are all that's needed to add to our own wrapper program to launch programs the same way.
I was finally able to get my patchstick working last night using the instructions on the AwakwardTV Wiki. It's actually a lot easier than it looks, your basically making 2 partitions, loading them up with all of the correct files (that you patched yourself or found somewhere else), then changing the partition table at the end to a string that the Apple TV will boot with.
I created 2 bash scripts that convert the partition table back and fourth from ATV mode and standard mode so I can get in and edit the root partition files on my mac mini.
Now that I have the correct files needed to boot on an apple tv, I can take a fresh apple tv from the store, and in a few minutes have it loaded up with every codec, plugin and screensaver available. Just pop in the USB stick, press Menu and - to reboot the ATV, and it will reboot and run teh code on the memory stick. The scripts on the stick copy over all relevant files and make any necessary changes to your Apple TV OS, then you simply reboot and enjoy all of your new plugins/screensavers/codecs.
There is still much more work to be done for the code to be moved over to 100% open source code so that a disk like this can be distributed to the masses legally, but I would imagine that sometime in the near future there will be a nice and easy drag and drop utility that includes all of the files you need to make a usb patchstick.
This opens the floodgates to a lot of people. Once these USB keys exist and more apps such as ATV Loader are released, the Apple TV Scene is going to explode. Now any idiot with $299 and a usb stick can become an 'Apple TV Hacker'.
I am looking forward to all of the new content I will be able to watch on my bigscreen. Have fun and keep it open source!
Hackers have begun to exploit the IR port of the Apple TV. Currently they have created a keyboard driver that emulates the IR sent from the remote so you can navigate through the ATV menu with a keyboard.
Other hackers have been coding applications and utilities to control the ATV GUI from the command line, which will eventually lead to other forms of external control, such as a built in web server.
This weekend the hackers are trying to fit multiple Operating Systems on the little Apple TV. Arodd on hackint0sh forums is reporting that he was able to format a drive with the Apple TV OS on one partition and regular OSX on another partition. By running a script, the Apple TV automatically reboots into the other OS.
He writes:
[code] I essentially Installed a fresh copy of osx to a 3.5" hard-drive(hackint0sh). Then popped in the ATV drive to my pc along with the fresh install. Then used Disk Utility to recover the osx partition from the 3.5" to the Media partition making sure to not reformat/erase partition. It will coexist with the Media/Scratch folders on the 4th partition.
Setup the usual mach_kernel/boot.efi mod using semthex's kernel and the guide from appletvhacks.net.
This is great work so far. I'm curious to see the source code for pulling external data into the Apple TV Menu. I would really like to see support for video podcast rss feeds in a future version of this. Something that can just stream video urls right off the rss feed.
The plugin community needs a good solid frappliance example that can pull in external data, then lots of fun content plugins like this can be created. For someone who does not know xcode, it's a bit hard to get started with frappliance development at the moment.
Oh what fun we can have with something like this: ElGato h.264 USB encoder stick.
I don't see any plugs on it, but I'm guessing it has a composite and svideo input? What about component? hdmi? I will post links with more information if I can find it.
Presumably, this would allow someone to stream a H.254 stream to the Apple TV without much CPU overhead (the encoding is done on the stick).
EricIII has released ATVFiles which adds a 'Files' Menu to the Apple TV Default Interface. The files section can be mounted to an NFS or AFP share on your network to share movies and music across the network without using iTunes.
Although EricIII has not released source code, some other developers on the InsanelyMac Forums have released the source code of their plugin which does something similar, and also one that can exit the ATV Finder app. You will need to download XCode to compile the source code.
AppleTVHacks.net has put out a $500 bounty for the first team who can successfully run asterisk on the Apple TV.
Asterisk is a complete IP PBX in software; PBX being a telephone exchange system like you may find in your office. It runs on a wide variety of operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Sun Solaris and supports Voice over IP in many protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware.
It's still a work in progress, but Quangdiggityon the Awkward TV wiki is compiling instructions on how to install SSH on your Apple TV without opening the case. It involves modifying the recovery image then booting from USB and doing a restore. Sounds like they should have things sorted out very soon, and then many, many more people will consider hacking their Apple TV's to do all of the cool things the hackers have planned
I'm not sure why anyone would really want to do this, but you can run the Apple TV OS on a macbook, and probably any other intel mac by the time you read this.
The software is not really the interesting part of the Apple TV, it's the $299 box with hdmi and component that can display high def content to screens. With LCD and Plasma displays decreasing in price so quickly, people are buying them up by the ton, and they will need sources to hook up to all of those inputs. The Apple TV Hardware, in a very short amount of time will become a great open source STB that pulls in content from all over the place. It small enough to tuck behind your LCD or plasma (who will be first to make an Apple TV mounting bracket?).
The fact that everyone on the internet is copying the Apple TV OS all over the place is just money in the bank for Apple. Each copy of Apple TV OS or iTunes running is another potential customer of Apple's DRM'ed content, bringing more $ in to them and giving them the user counts they need to get more studios to sign with them.
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For more info on the files you need to install Apple TV OS on your Mac, head over to hackint0sh.org
Unload Watchdog (should put this in a startup script) kextunload -v -b com.apple.driver.AppleTCOWatchdog Disable Ripstop: (part of watchdog) mkdir /etc/mach_init.disabled mv /etc/mach_init.d/ripstop.plist /etc/mach_init.disabled
Change your default Finder: defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow Finder /path/to/your.app
Launch the Default Finder: /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder
Mike spent 8 hours yesterday figuring out the correct settings needed to convert DVD's to be played on the Apple TV. He is using the software called MediaFork to do the conversions. He has posted detailed instructions and settings information for converting DVDs into h.264 videos compatible with Apple TV.
So your ready to void your warranty and start hacking your Apple TV? Make Blog has detailed directions and photographs on the process of taking apart the Apple TV and removing the hard drive.
Alternatively, you could use the contents of the file from above to create an ssh.plist file. Step 2
Unmount the OSBoot and Media volumes, reassemble your Apple TV, and power it on. You need to get the IP address of the Apple TV from the Settings menu, once you know that, open a Terminal window from your Mac (or any OS that has ssh installed) and type:
ssh frontrow@your.apple.tv.ip.address
Press return. Type “yes” when it asks if you want to permanently store the key. Then enter “frontrow” as the password.
Awkward, the man behind most of the Perian developments we've been posting about, has put up a wiki to begin collecting information about all of the additional things the Apple TV can do with some slight modifications.
Jonathan Bare, who was mentioned yesterday for replacing the Apple TV Hard drive with a larger one has continued searching through the filesystem of the Apple TV to discover a few more intresting tidbits. The software running on Apple TV has been dubbed by Apple as “Backrow”:
The interface that runs Apple TV is, in part at least, apparently called BackRow and can be found in the OSBoot/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/BackRow.framework. All of the imagery and the Intro.mov startup movie for the Apple TV can be found in the Resources directory at that location.
You can also find the background logo for the boot at OSBoot/System/Library/BootLogo.png
So if your brave enough to pry open your Apple TV and fiddle with the filesystem, you can look forward to implanting your own video file for the intro movie and boot logo. Yay!
Jonathan Bare has posted information about swapping the hard drive in the Apple TV for a bigger one. He gets the $100 bounty provided by AppleTVHacks.net for being the first to provide a guide on how to do it.
The folks on the somethingawful message boards have figured out how to launch apps on the Apple TV. This means having an OSX box hooked up to your TV can cost just $300. People are already able to install things such as VNC and other apps. Things are starting to get really interesting with AppleTV!
The software used to allow the Apple TV to play other video formats is called Perian. This means that the Apple TV can potentially play all of these formats: MS-MPEG4 v1, MS-MPEG4 v2, MS-MPEG4 v3, DivX 3.11 alpha, DivX, XviD, 3ivX, MPEG4 video, H.264, Sorenson H.263, Flash Screen Video, Truemotion VP6, WMV, VBR MP3, AAC, and AC3 Audio
The goal of the Perian Project is to build a QuickTime component wrapper for the libraries produced for OS X. Perian enables QuickTime-based playback tools access to more file formats and codecs.
